Beyond Words

Those of you who know me know that I seldom am lost for words.  On Friday night both Ernesto and I found words inadequate to express our sentiments.

As some of you will recall, we arrived to our house on Friday morning only to be greeted by a dead mouse in the toilet (see my last post).  After flushing the mouse, we unloaded our luggage on our bed, grabbed a few items, changed clothes, and prepared to go to work.  Ernesto and I both noticed that our bedroom smelled a bit rancid, but I figured the smell was simply staleness and I opened the window before we left for the Institute.

When we returned to the house after work the bedroom still smelled a bit rotten.  We began to unpack bags, along with the help of Ernesto's 12 year old cousin, Diego.  We'd transfered most of the contents of the luggage onto the bed before we took a break to have dinner with some friends in town.  Thank goodness I decided to have two glasses of wine during dinner; otherwise, I'm not sure I could have dealt with the events to follow.

Returning to the house, we were perplexed that the bedroom still smelled so bad.  Earlier I told Ernesto that it'd be a good idea to change our sheets, even though they were fresh when we had left for holiday. Maybe the smell was due to mold that had grown on the sheets in our absence?

Ernesto, who was more bothered by the odor than I, began sniffing around the room for a source.  As I put things away throughout the house, he began to undress the bed, which is when I heard him yell a series of colorful, unrepeatable phrases in Spanish.  Ernesto then yelled for me to come in the room.  I decided that whatever was in the room was not going to please me, so I declined.  Ernesto then told me that he had found the source of the stench.  I'm sure that those of you who follow our blog regularly can guess what he had found.

What was left on those sheets, on our bed, where we rest our heads, was really one of the most repulsive sights I have ever seen.  Words are insufficient to convey the repulsion we both felt.  A mouse had crawled under one of our pillows and proceeded to urinate and defecate numerous times before hemorrhaging profusely and dying in a pool of blood.  Even now the thought makes me gag.

Ernesto, with Diego's supervision, threw the pillow (upon which the mouse was stuck) outside and then forced me to come into the room to help him with the sheets.  So we carefully stripped the sheets and tried to shove them into undersized garbage bags (we really need to invest in garden-size bags given our experiences with cow carcasses and rodents) without touching any contaminated fabric.  We then removed the mattress protector and tried to determine whether the actual mattress had been contaminated.  Ernesto doused the mattress in hand sanitizer and baking soda and then we flipped and turned the mattress, covered it in three layers of sheets, and scrounged for clean blankets to use for the night.  Every stain and spot we saw on any fabric was suspect and got doused in hand cleanser.

Then we looked for pillows, but all had been on the bed and were thus, to some extent, contaminated.  Luckily, I had brought back from San Jose with us my "pregnancy pillow" (no, I'm not preggers - it's for my lower back), which was long enough for both of us to use.  Ernesto was about to put it on the bed when he smelled it and declared that it too had been contaminated by stench.  Now, I'm no pathologist, and I didn't actually see the mouse (only its excretions), but I'm pretty sure from the stench that the mouse was dead well before we arrived in the house, so I wasn't sure how the stench had so thoroughly permeated my pillow.  Ernesto made me sniff the pillow and it did indeed stink terribly, but not of mouse.  Instead, it was infused with the unmistakable scent of anal gland secretion, compliments of our dog, Kaia.  By this point, we were so overwhelmed by our senses that only laughter seemed appropriate.  I startled to giggle and then Diego completely lost it - slapping his knees with glee.  It was a much needed moment of comic relief.

We ended up sleeping on pillows from the couch, which we couldn't be sure hadn't been trampled on by scurrying, infectious feet.  But given our limited options, we tried to sleep.

I can't speak for Ernesto, but I slept very little Friday night.  I felt so violated and angry.  These little critters invaded our oven, our closet, our food stuffs, and our toilet.  Then they invaded our bed, used our bed as a toilet, and actually gnawed holes through our pillow cases before one found it convenient to make our bed his deathbed.  This was simply too much for me to swallow.

Sooo, I am now on the lookout for a cat.  Yes, a cat.  Because sticky traps and rat poison just aren't cutting it.  And yes, I strongly dislike cats, as you know if you read my first blog post.  But it turns out that there's an animal I despise even more than cats.

Life has a way of making me eat my words.  Fortunately, I'm fully prepared to eat my words about cats if cats will eat these mice. Ernesto has already decided that our future cat will be named Bulldozer.  Sounds good to me, as long as he bulldozes the mice from my life.